Fitness, health, and nutrition experts and enthusiasts consistently claim that water boosts fat loss. But does it really? And if it does, how does this process work?
Let’s tackle the first question: Does water enhance fat loss?
The answer is YES. Okay…but why?
- Water serves as an appetite suppressant. If your water intake is sufficient, you are less likely to experience cravings. If you drink enough water, your hunger pains will be legitimate cries for food. If you don’t drink enough water, your hunger pains, more often than not, are probably cries for hydration.
- Your kidneys require an adequate supply of water. If they are leeched of water, they will not be happy and your body’s waste dumping process will be compromised. When the kidneys don’t get enough water, the liver ends up operating poorly. Your liver is responsible for receiving fat cells and converting them into energy (instead of letting them sit around and accumulate). With enough water, this conversion happens quickly and effectively, optimizing fat loss.
- When you start shedding fat, the body senses an emergency. Evolutionarily speaking, lack of fat suggests lack of food, which in turn, suggests lack of resources, including lack of water. Drinking an abundance of water helps to keep that biological panic and a potential binge at bay.
- Consuming lots of water increases urine output. Urinating is a process of thermogenesis – a mechanism by which the body produces heat. When your body produces heat, it’s using up energy i.e. burning calories. So, the more trips to the W.C. you take, the more calories your are burning.
- Drinking water boosts metabolism because the body has to warm the water up to body temperature. This increase in heat production burns more calories. It is recommended that you drink 1 liter of water first thing in the morning to really jump-start your metabolism.
Clearly, water appears to benefit the process of fat loss. However, I wouldn’t label it a fat loss dynamo. While it does offer mild support in aiding fat loss, it takes much more to burn fat and keep it off. It takes a clean, balanced diet combined with an active lifestyle. Drinking lots of water will not prevent weight gain and cut fat in the absence of the other healthy-living components. But if you have a healthy diet and keep up with your workouts at the Pivotal Fitness Greenville gym, water holds promise to augment your fat loss.
If you do both strength training and cardio at the Pivotal Fitness Greenville athletic club, try to drink about 1 gallon of water per day to sufficiently augment fat loss.